Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Incendiary Device

Melissa Mowbray-d'Arbela is an unlikely player in the cigarette business, an incongruous figure in an industry run by Southern tobacco farmers on the production side and secretive capitalists on the retail side. You can see this in her appearance (the tailored suits, the chiseled face, the exotic appearance) and the elite résumé (stints as a lawyer at Skadden Arps and as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers). You can also see it in her personal history and opinions. Born in England, raised in poverty in Australia by a mother who is half-Russian and half-Ugandan, Mowbray-d'Arbela, 38, has never smoked. In her view, no one should. And those who do should quit. Those who have failed to quit should try again. She does not take issue with the World Health Organization's projection that 500 million people now alive will eventually die from smoking-related diseases; when I first met her for breakfast late last winter in Manhattan, she actually pointed me to that very statistic. She then made an impassioned presentation about the toxins in tobacco, a display so granularly detailed and footnoted and cross-indexed that when she began to talk about the 4,000 or so chemicals (including some 60 known carcinogens) released by every burning cigarette, a tally now agreed upon by virtually all tobacco scientists, I feared she might list every one.

In fact, Mowbray-d'Arbela is not a tobacco executive but the head of a Hong Kong-based biotechnology company, Filligent, that has created a filter for a new type of cigarette. This cigarette, produced by an independent tobacco company at a factory in Timberlake, N.C., is expected to go on sale later this month in several states under the brand name Fact. It looks like any other cigarette, smells like any other cigarette, draws like any other cigarette. But if you were to tear apart a Fact cigarette, as I did one spring morning at the North Carolina plant, the filter would seem peculiar. Divided into two halves, the segment called the "mouth end" is composed of a white fibrous material, cellulose acetate, found in almost all cigarette filters. But the other half -- a plug inserted between the mouth end and the tobacco -- looks like tightly wadded crepe paper, colored teal blue. This segment, treated with a patented chemical process developed by several scientists over the past 12 years, screens out a variety of cancer-causing toxins. In several independent lab tests I obtained, Filligent's filter appeared to substantially reduce the mutagenic activity caused by cigarette smoke. Compared with a typical cigarette, those reductions (as measured per milligram of nicotine, an essential way to evaluate how many chemicals a smoker is ingesting) generally ranged between 40 and 75 percent.

In industryspeak, Fact is what's known as a potentially reduced-exposure product, or PREP. It is by no means the only one: the big tobacco companies have been experimenting with such cigarettes for at least the past decade, only to find that their harsh taste or unconventional packaging (several use electronic devices to heat the tobacco rather than burn it) have made them nonstarters in the marketplace. Still, all of the well-known PREP's -- Omni, Eclipse, Accord, to name a few -- are examples of a new product line in its infancy. Philip Morris, which commands nearly 50 percent of the United States cigarette market, has devoted hundreds of million of dollars to researching less hazardous products. This has led those in tobacco-policy circles to conclude that it is only a matter of time before the company develops and promotes a brand that meets with wide popular acceptance. As Kenneth Warner, a public health professor at the University of Michigan and the head of the Tobacco Research Network at the school, told me recently, "The PREP's that most of us are concerned about are the honest-to-god cigarettes, real cigarettes, that are modified to reduce specific toxins." A popular reduced-exposure cigarette is the kind of earthquake that many in the public health field have anticipated, like a team of worried geologists, for several years. According to a number of scientists and tobacco policy makers, PREP's are the single most ethically agonizing and professionally confusing issue they have ever encountered.

This seems somewhat dissonant. What could be wrong with reducing the risk of smoking for the hopelessly addicted? As Mowbray-d'Arbela says, making a point that seems both pragmatic and empathetic, "We have to do something about the one billion smokers who by 2010 either can't or won't quit." After talking with a number of health experts and spending time in a hospital ward, she says, she became convinced that the benefits of an improved filter outweigh the dangers.

Those dangers are many and persistent, however. The science of tobacco is so murky, and the links between the components of smoke and illness so tenuously understood, that many researchers question whether reducing the exposure of smokers to certain chemicals can actually reduce the risk of disease. What's more, a so-called safer cigarette that removes some carcinogens might inadvertently raise the levels of other toxins, a phenomenon that has already been observed in some PREP's. Then there is a third predicament. If a new, independently produced cigarette like Fact -- or, just as likely, a product from a big tobacco company backed by enormous marketing resources -- promises to lower the odds of disease for smokers, couldn't it increase cigarette consumption? This is what most scares antitobacco policy makers. The more successfully a cigarette reduces risk, the more it might encourage smokers not to quit. Or lure ex-smokers to resume their habit. Or make kids smokers. It might, in other words, do exactly the opposite of what it is intended to do. In a worst-case scenario, it could reverse a half-century of antismoking education, policy and litigation in a flash. Conversations about harm reduction usually begin with the example of methadone, the synthetic narcotic that is often used to wean heroin addicts from their illegal drug by replacing it with a controlled one. Methadone has gained the backing of most of the medical establishment over the past few decades not because it is easy to kick -- the drug has actually proved at least as habit-forming as heroin -- but because it has been shown to help addicts function better and lead longer and more productive lives. Moreover, it is taken orally (as opposed to intravenously), and so it has been credited with helping to reduce the spread of H.I.V.

When it comes to tobacco, there is, of course, a drug already sold to addicts as an over-the-counter medication: nicotine. But should nicotine products, useful as they have been in helping millions of smokers to quit, be the last word on harm reduction when fewer than 10 percent of smokers who attempt to quit each year succeed? Should nicotine addicts only have a choice between using a nicotine patch, say, and quitting altogether? What if too many users are too habituated to the act of smoking itself? Would truly reducing the mortality rates associated with smoking require a less-hazardous variation on an actual cigarette?

Mowbray-d'Arbela has spent a good amount of time wrestling with the issue. She was running a small venture-capital firm in Hong Kong when she first heard about Filligent from Neal Stewart, a tech pioneer who founded Astec, a large provider of power-supply components to the electronics and computer industries. Stewart is the kind of serial entrepreneur who tends to have several projects going at once. In early 2000, he was trying to get a call-center business going in the Philippines, and Mowbray-d'Arbela's venture firm had invested money in his project; at the same time, he and some colleagues were tinkering with a cigarette-filter technology he had had in the back of his mind -- "a tickle," as Stewart puts it -- for a number of years.

The son of a heavy smoker, Stewart had encouraged some biochemical engineers to get involved in the filter project in the mid-1990's, and as a group they developed the basic technology a few years later, all the while making sure they acquired patent claims along the way. Stewart picked the name Filligent because he regarded the filtration system as intelligent. "Not knowing the tobacco industry, there was no strategy in that stage in terms of what do we do with this thing," Stewart recalled not long ago. "It was much more a bunch of people seeing if the chemistry would work." When he found out that it did -- the filter is treated with a porphyrin, an organic compound that bonds to a variety of chemicals in smoke and prevents them from reaching the smoker -- he took the idea and some lab results to Mowbray-d'Arbela to see if she would help commercialize it. It was 2001, and she immediately refused. "He mentioned the word 'tobacco,' and I said no, I'm not doing it," she said. "I'd had plenty of opportunities as an investment banker to work on tobacco deals, and I always managed to say that for ideological reasons I wouldn't." Stewart spent an afternoon at her home in Hong Kong and convinced her, over pots of tea, to at least think it over. Mowbray-d'Arbela took the idea to her husband, a physician-turned-investment banker, who reviewed the materials and thought the filter chemistry seemed feasible. She tentatively signed on and spent the next year teaching herself everything she could about biochemistry, cancer, smoke chemistry and the history of the tobacco industry.

She also brought the idea for Filligent to Judith Mackay, a doctor and the senior policy adviser on tobacco to the World Health Organization, who happened to work across town. Mackay, arguably one of the most influential antitobacco policy makers in the world, has been especially effective in calling attention to the high levels of smoking and smoking-related illnesses in developing countries. "I think we have to do harm reduction," Mackay told me, "but we all know that we have to be cautious about its presentation to smokers so that we don't deceive them." After looking over the science behind the filter, she says, she didn't harbor much hesitation: she encouraged Mowbray-d'Arbela to pursue the project, even as she warned her to tread carefully. Mackay then invited Mowbray-d'Arbela to the 2003 World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Helsinki to see firsthand how the antitobacco lobby felt about the dangers of PREP's. One day, in a quiet corner of the lobby of a Helsinki hotel, Mackay introduced Mowbray-d'Arbela to Matthew Myers, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one of the leading antitobacco advocacy groups in the United States. Mowbray-d'Arbela explained her project as Myers listened thoughtfully, offering suggestions. Throughout the conference, Mowbray-d'Arbela repeated the drill. She requested confidentiality and then described the Filligent idea, usually in general terms that gave listeners the impression that she was talking about a concept rather than a product.

There actually was a product, but even before the conference Mowbray-d'Arbela had concluded that bringing the filter to market required changes. The first problem was nicotine, which the filter was partially screening. Apart from its dangers to pregnant women, nicotine has been shown to pose few great hazards to the average user; its primary health risk comes from inducing smokers to ingest thousands of other dangerous chemicals that burning tobacco produces. Indeed, reducing nicotine and reducing harm are increasingly viewed as two contrary goals. Cigarettes that are low in the drug, for instance, marketed as "lights" or "ultra lights," are now believed to be as deadly as their high-tar, high-nicotine predecessors, since smokers compensate for nicotine deficiency by smoking more cigarettes or taking more puffs per cigarette. "Based on our research, we decided that we shouldn't be touching nicotine," Mowbray-d'Arbela says. "So I had the guys come back and figure out a way to have the chemical compound in the filter, instead of attracting nicotine, repel it." That step, she says, took another year.

In the United States, Mowbray-d'Arbela decided the easiest way to get the product in stores would be to team up with one of the independent discount-cigarette vendors that now control about 10 percent of the market. Because such vendors are sensitive to even the most modest price increases, a Filligent filter had to be cheap enough not to push up the cost of a pack of cigarettes by very much. And this focus on cost was even more important for the international market. There are 45 countries where the tobacco industry is nationalized; the biggest tobacco company in the world happens to be the Chinese government, which controls cigarette sales to an estimated 350 million smokers. (There are 50 million or so smokers in the United States.) In Judith Mackay's view, Asia would be the biggest market for any reduced-exposure filter -- a product that a government like China's could mandate be included in Chinese cigarettes, without any fanfare, as long as the price of the filter were reasonable. One of every three cigarettes smoked in the world is smoked in China, Mackay says, "so I think if you're looking at harm reduction, the rest of the world is more important than the United States."

Does Mackay, who has pored over the lab data on Filligent, think the product has the potential to make a difference? "It's exciting," she says. "I think it holds a real possibility." But she is quick to add that she can't say for sure if it will save hundreds of thousands of lives -- or even a single life. Any reliable epidemiological studies on smokers are longitudinal in nature, meaning they can require several decades and a large group of subjects to show meaningful results. It hasn't been until the last few years, for instance, that public health officials have begun to correlate the rise in adenocarcinoma, a cancer deep in the lungs and often difficult to detect, to the introduction of the low-nicotine light and ultra-light cigarettes that became popular in the 1970's and 1980's. Smokers draw smoke from these cigarettes more deeply into their lungs in an effort to get more nicotine.

Mackay says that it could be 20 years before anyone understands just how well, or how poorly, Filligent works. Mowbray-d'Arbela concedes that it's possible we may never understand. It is a curiosity that most Americans know a great deal about smoking -- its lures and its dangers, the damage it can wreak on families -- while knowing very little about cigarettes. In part, this is because those who do not smoke have no interest in a product they despise. But it is also a result of how effectively the big tobacco companies have obscured what goes into their cigarettes, often giving the incorrect impression that all lights or ultra-lights are the same, or that a popular brand might actually be consistent from year to year or country to country. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to engineer a cigarette -- by modifying the blend of tobaccos from season to season or sprinkling on chemical additives that affect taste and burn rate or lengthening a filter or changing its composition and altering the porosity of the wrapping papers so that more air mixes with the smoke. At the end of last year, the people at Filligent, working with a European paper manufacturer, figured out a way to bring the cost of their filter to within a fraction of a cent more than a typical cigarette filter -- an acceptable price point, in their view. But Filligent still had to find a company able to make and market cigarettes to which it could license its filter. An industry consultant connected them with Alex De La Cruz, who runs a Florida-based company known as the New Century Tobacco Group. New Century was about to start producing several new brands of cigarettes in Timberlake. There, a group of tobacco farmers, the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corporation, had just bought a factory. Foreign imports and the erosion of farm quotas had frayed their traditional relationships with the big tobacco companies, so the farmers were going into business on their own. They had decided that because they already grew and cured tobacco, they might as well roll it up and sell it, too, Arnold Hamm, the head of the cooperative, told me. When De La Cruz and Mowbray-d'Arbela approached Hamm about producing cigarettes with special filters, he said he had no problem with that. Plus, he had all the tobacco they could use.

To visit a cigarette factory is to see, at once, how a billion people can smoke a pack or two a day, every day, without ever facing a product shortage. The Timberlake plant is like a brightly lighted gymnasium, clamorous with the rhythms of assembly-line machines. The humidity level inside the facility is set at 60 percent, and an earthy, vegetal and not unpleasant aroma of cured tobacco hangs in the heavy air. On the machines, a long, narrow sheet of cigarette paper is laid flat and loose shreds of tobacco leaf known as cut-rag are poured onto it; the automated line moves these protocigarettes along as they are cut, rolled, glued, fitted with a filter, cut to size again, stacked and piled up in a hopper for packaging -- 20 to a pack, 10 packs to a carton and, on the morning I was there, 50 cartons to a case. The pace is relentless. "Each of these machines can do 6,000 to 7,000 cigarettes per minute," Tim Jackson, the plant manager, explained to me, "so on a good day on one machine you could do 2.5 million on an eight-hour shift." Jackson remarked that there were actually seven cigarette machines (called modules) in the room and that he could command three shifts per day. Running at full throttle, the Timberlake plant, which is neither the fastest nor the largest in the United States, could produce more than 45 million cigarettes a day.

It's doubtful the demand for Fact will reach such a level. Later that day, Jackson and I sat down to plates of pulled pork and fried okra at the Hog Heaven Bar-B-Q with Alex De La Cruz. I asked Jackson what he would consider a success for the launch. "If in 18 months it is trending at a quarter of a billion cigarettes per year -- which is one-quarter of 1 percent of market share -- I would consider that a success," he said.

"I think I would be happy with the level Tim is talking about," De La Cruz said. "But I would envision something much bigger."

Jackson wasn't inclined to agree. A long-distance runner who smokes two cigarettes a day, usually plucked from the assembly line to test for quality (never on weekends), he said he thought the prospects of getting smokers to switch to Fact for health reasons were dim. "I think even with my number we would need incredible effort and incredible luck to get to that level," he said.

It will need to be luck, then, if you can call it that, because there is no great promotional effort behind Fact: De La Cruz, who owns the brand, will do only minimal marketing. As for Filligent, it will have no marketing campaign, no advertising budget -- nothing except for the Filligent group's expectation, perhaps, of a public-relations bump resulting from its willingness to talk about its product with those in the media, as it did with me. (While Filligent has a large American law firm representing its legal interests, it has no publicity agent.) Indeed, because PREP's are such a sensitive issue, Mowbray-d'Arbela and De La Cruz will not make any health claims for Fact cigarettes, although in the coming months their companies may each set up a Web site to make raw laboratory data available. During one of our conversations, I asked Mowbray-d'Arbela if she had considered more subtle ways of trying to reach consumers -- a buzz campaign, e-mail, something stealthy. "Viral marketing, what would you get from that?" she asked, somewhat taken aback by the possibility. "It would be people saying, 'Here, try this cigarette.' But there is no safe cigarette. There is no safe level of consumption."

She paused and laughed slightly at the paradox -- of wanting, yet not wanting, consumers to smoke the product she has been trying to bring to market. "I know it's a peculiar situation," she said. "I hope this will work. I think it will." Her goal beyond getting Fact to the market, she explained, is for other cigarette manufacturers to license her company's technology and insert Filligent filters in their cigarettes without calling attention to the reduced-risk potential or even noting that there is a new filter inside. If any of those companies make health claims, Mowbray-d'Arbela told me, Filligent could stop shipping its filter paper to them. "Then we would sue them," she said. In this case -- much like the one that Judith Mackay envisioned for China -- the inveterate smoker would never know he or she had bought something potentially less hazardous, and the nonsmoker (or ex-smoker) would never be enticed by reduced-risk claims.

Another outcome Mowbray-d'Arbela would welcome is for her product to be scientifically rated by the federal government. During its formulation, Filligent relied upon a testing process, conducted by several independent biological laboratories, that focused on the filter's reduction of a cigarette's overall toxicity in relation to its nicotine content. (Among other things, the labs simulated the filter's ability to reduce the DNA mutations that often lead to cancer through a measure called the Ames Test, a common evaluation used by food and drug regulators.) The claims from big tobacco companies have usually focused on whether, or how much, their PREP's cut down on specific deleterious constituents in tobacco smoke, regardless of whether they are low or high in nicotine.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Filligent's testing method is arguably superior, because it takes into account the fact that any smoker of low-nicotine cigarettes will probably compensate by smoking more and inhaling more chemical compounds. Yet the filter company's strategy means little in a market where there are no standards and even no certainties about which scientific tests are best to evaluate a PREP. At the moment, all cigarette vendors operate in the wilds beyond product regulation, with vast opportunities to alter their ingredients or finesse their lab results into marketing claims. In the mid-1990's, the United States Food and Drug Administration began to regulate tobacco and tobacco marketing, an effort that was turned back in 2000 when the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 opinion stating that the agency had exceeded its authority. A proposed law giving the F.D.A. specific powers to regulate tobacco passed in a Senate bill last year, only to be struck from the bill in conference committee. "If it's light yogurt or low-fat milk, there's a certain standard today for all food products," Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican from Ohio who reintroduced the legislation with Ted Kennedy this year, told me. DeWine calls the situation ludicrous. "In cigarettes you can say anything you want to say," he says. "And it's going to get even worse when they get into a new generation of cigarettes when they are seriously trying to cut down on the risk -- and they may even be able to cut down on the risk. We don't know that. But they're going to be making claims. And there needs to be some umpire to look at those claims."

Until then, technology will move faster than government. And the next generation of cigarettes, as a result, could lead to the same consequences as the last generation of cigarettes. "Light and ultra-lights are perhaps the greatest fraud in the history of consumer marketing that has ever been perpetrated on the American public," Mitch Zeller, a former associate commissioner of the F.D.A. who helped lead the agency's tobacco program from 1994 to 2000, says. "And they became a public health disaster in part by well-intentioned folks in public health 30 years ago who simply didn't know any better." In Zeller's view (he was not aware of Filligent), the new products might well be "lights all over again."

Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has similar concerns. "I think it's face value that the makers of Filligent are looking to reduce the harm caused by tobacco products," he says. "If those filters were put on otherwise-unchanged tobacco products and if they were shown to significantly reduce actual exposure to toxic substances, and if there were no health-based claims made about them, that would be a positive development." Yet Myers would never give even the faintest endorsement to such a product until a change in the regulatory environment has created strict testing standards and placed limits on marketing claims. "For someone like me, Filligent is the ultimate conundrum," he says. "What do you do when you have someone outside the industry who genuinely wants to improve public health? How do you foster that kind of innovation without opening the door for the tobacco industry to continue to mislead consumers?" By late April, the filligent launch was still being kept quiet -- perhaps 50 people in the world knew about the product, and only a few of them, like Myers and Judith Mackay, were in the public health community. For the most part, the main topic of conversation in antitobacco circles this spring was a new cigarette called Marlboro Ultra Smooth, three different versions of which were being initially test marketed for taste in Tampa, Atlanta and Salt Lake City. Ultra Smooth is the first product from Philip Morris's Smoke Constituent Reduction (SCOR) program, a secretive research and development effort by the tobacco giant to create a new kind of reduced-exposure cigarettes. Philip Morris was not yet making any health claims with the release of Ultra Smooth. But the fact that it comes from its SCOR program had set off a scramble by health officials to see what Philip Morris was up to.

In the early spring, as I kept tabs on Filligent's progress in North Carolina, I spoke to a number of tobacco researchers who were waiting impatiently for friends, colleagues or distant acquaintances in the three test-market cities to purchase a carton of Ultra Smooths. One such researcher was Gregory Connolly at the Harvard School of Public Health, who proceeded to dissect the cigarettes with a razor blade the day they finally arrived from his contacts in the South and West. Connolly then began the lengthy process of lab-testing the cigarettes to find out what the filter actually does in terms of reducing carcinogens. In Buffalo, Michael Cummings of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute followed a similar procedure. He could barely contain his scorn for Philip Morris's taste test, however, joking darkly, "The race is really to see who in these three communities dies the fastest."

I asked Cummings why he thought the market tests of the Ultra Smooths were such a big deal. "It's a big deal because it's Philip Morris, which is a big deal," he replied. "It's a big deal because it's Marlboro, which has 40 percent of the market share in the United States. It's a big deal because these companies are still doing human experimentation without consent. It's a big deal because Philip Morris has a history of deception and concealment, and there is nothing that would change my view that this is any different today." After a quick analysis of the filter and tobacco, Cummings seemed to view the product as a subtle and insubstantial variation on the light cigarette, albeit one with an activated charcoal filter (an invention dating back 40 years or so) that would scrub some of the toxic gasses from the smoke. "Philip Morris knows a lot about nicotine pharmacology, they know more than anyone in the world, and they could probably do a lot more good than something like Marlboro Ultra Smooth," Cummings said. "This is tragic."

When I spoke with Philip Morris, the company declined to publicly confirm many details of the Marlboro Ultra Smooth campaign. It is unlikely, however, that Philip Morris will roll out this product any time this year. The Ultra Smooth tests are the first of many to gauge the appeal of the flavor of the company's next generation of cigarettes -- merely one aspect of a comprehensive research, marketing and lobbying effort. Last year, in preparing to introduce these products, Philip Morris backed the ill-fated DeWine-Kennedy bill that would have led to F.D.A. oversight of tobacco. "I think the regulation would give them a market advantage over the other companies," Connolly says. "Philip Morris is building a $300 million research facility in Richmond to build safer cigarettes. They're betting that they'll be the only company to meet an F.D.A. bar for exposure." When Philip Morris's C.E.O., Michael E. Szymanczyk, testified in April in a case against his company -- the Department of Justice is accusing the big tobacco companies of engaging in "a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public" -- he said nearly as much. F.D.A. regulation, Szymanczyk testified, "would provide consistency in tobacco policy, more predictability for the tobacco industry and an effective means of addressing issues that are of concern to our company, our consumers and society." Asked under oath why his company had spent so much money and effort on reduced-harm cigarettes, Szymanczyk replied, "In addition to being the right thing to do, pursuing less-hazardous products also offers us a potential competitive advantage."

There is little doubt that Szymanczyk also knows the depths of his customers' brand loyalty. They may never switch to a newcomer like Fact. They also seem uninterested in switching to a variety of new oral tobacco products -- generally viewed as far less hazardous than cigarettes -- that have been introduced in the past few years. But market research suggests that large numbers of smokers would be inclined to give a new "smoother" Marlboro a shot. Recently I had the opportunity to see videotapes of some consumer panels that gave the impression that any reduced-exposure product from Marlboro would encourage smokers not to quit, especially if it comes with modest health claims. Those responses were very much in line with "The Path to a Safer Cigarette," a recent report from J.P. Morgan's global equity research division, which went so far as to suggest that PREP's are the key to the future growth of the cigarette industry. In one survey of smokers, the analysts found that 85 percent of smokers would be willing to try a cigarette that could significantly lower health risks. They estimated that PREP's could account for $1 billion in United States sales by 2009 and more than $20 billion by 2015.

Could it happen sooner? "We're seeing a constant rate of quitting," Ken Warner of the University of Michigan says. "So they're trying to find a product to keep people as their customers. And let's be straight: the tobacco companies don't want to kill their customers; that's just an unfortunate side effect. If they can come up with something substantially less risky, of course they will try to sell it. They just haven't gotten there yet."

To Mitch Zeller, there is more than mere economics at work: Philip Morris's reduced-risk project fits into the company's broader campaign of corporate social responsibility (the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on its youth-smoking-prevention efforts, for instance) and its cultural philanthropy. And of course it also enables the company to show judges and juries that it is taking steps in the direction of harm reduction. "All of these programs are part of a much larger strategic effort by Philip Morris to change public perception," he says. "One of the goals here is to demonstrate to their target audience that they are a changed company and that they have achieved -- and these are terms from internal Philip Morris documents -- 'Societal Alignment' and 'corporate normalcy."' Already, public opinion surveys have shown that the company has significantly improved upon its abysmal public image of the late 1990's. PREP's, Zeller says, might help even more. They present an enormous opportunity for the rehabilitation of a consumer product, and the rehabilitation of a corporate reputation, that seemed beneath contempt as recently as just a few years ago. Part of the extraordinary challenge for Filligent and New Century Tobacco is to prove to those in the antismoking policy ranks that their product is different from anything that has come from the big tobacco companies: different in its technology, efficacy, marketing, aims and social responsibility. For some public health officials, that may not be enough; some scientists and physicians are profoundly skeptical that any kind of burning cigarette, no matter how radical the technology or earnest its patron, can be a reduced-risk product. But others may yet be receptive, especially if Filligent performs well in the academic lab testing and human testing that inevitably follow the release of any new PREP -- and if Filligent successfully prevents the brands that license its product from making any health claims.

I met up one last time with Mowbray-d'Arbela one afternoon in late April in Manhattan. She was with her lieutenant, Ben Frickel, who had just flown with her from Hong Kong to Miami (to meet with Alex De La Cruz) and then to Timberlake (to meet with plant officials). I asked her what success would mean for her product in the actual marketplace, where politics and health officials hold little sway, where buyers care mostly about brand and price. It seemed the things she worried about most were the various distribution hurdles associated with helping De La Cruz get Fact into the stores. "For us, success is if we can just get this product on the streets in a responsible manner," she said.

As we spoke, Frickel, a social smoker, produced a Ziploc bag of Filligent-fitted cigarettes he had brought with him from the factory. They seemed vaguely illicit, as if we were in one of those Ayn Rand novels where the cartoonish and heroically capitalistic characters occasionally light up cigarettes stamped with a dollar sign.

Mowbray-d'Arbela and Frickel are not at all cartoonish. But they are venture capitalists, and as the conversation drifted to the topic of money, I asked if they had any idea what kind of return they would get on their investment. Mowbray-d'Arbela maintained that she wondered less at this point about what they'll do with their profits and more about when the backers -- all told, there are about a dozen -- will be able to recoup their money. Mowbray-d'Arbela, Frickel and Neal Stewart all told me they have made a point of choosing individuals (no institutional investors) who can afford to take a bath. "None of us who are invested in this have put in our last dollar," Mowbray-d'Arbela said, "and all of us are committed to making this work for what I would call the right reasons -- that this is the solution that should go out to as many people as possible to address the needs of smokers." Should it succeed in becoming profitable, she added, the company planned to give a significant portion of its profits -- she would not specify how much -- to antitobacco efforts.

Of course, Filligent could well make a lot of people rich. One way that might happen is if the filter technology is licensed to other companies in, say, Europe, Japan and the developing world. In this case, the United States market might be viewed as more of a tactical gambit then a bet-the-company strategy. "We'd like the United States to be a leader for this," Mowbray-d'Arbela said, noting that the largest tobacco companies are headquartered here and that the rest of the world looks to the United States markets as the example. Yet she and Frickel acknowledged that their company's Hong Kong locale has shaped their outlook as well as their business plan. "The international markets are integral to our strategy," Frickel said. "We've focused on the U.S. as our introductory market, and we plan to dovetail international sales right behind that. But if for some reason the U.S. market doesn't work out -- it would be unfortunate, but it's a possibility -- we're ready to go to several markets in Europe and South America and Asia. We're working on that currently." The two said they could not discuss specifics publicly. But as Judith Mackay of the World Health Organization pointed out, getting the Filligent product into many of these markets, especially those where the government has tight reins on the tobacco industry, would involve a top-down approach (essentially pitching it through government channels). Such an approach would be unsuited to the United States, where the product would bubble up through the mass market. In any event, both Frickel and Mowbray-d'Arbela acknowledged that Filligent could turn out to be a next-generation product in more ways than one. It might languish without any impact whatsoever on this generation of smokers, only to gain traction many years from now, perhaps in a future time when the F.D.A. exerts some authority over risk-reduction claims. In the meantime, a heavily promoted product that comes out from Philip Morris's SCOR program could bury it.

With so many contingencies in play -- consumer acceptance, lab verifications, marketing claims, F.D.A. authority, even Mowbray-d'Arbela's expectation that counterfeiters might soon be peddling fake teal-blue Filligent filters in Asia -- it seemed difficult to imagine what the future looked like. "What do you think will happen?" Neal Stewart, the original mover behind the filter, asked me on the phone from the Philippines one evening. "Because really I have no idea."

I didn't venture a guess. Even the veterans of tobacco policy are loath to make predictions in this area. "On the one hand, the optimist says, we're on the verge of the era of these low-risk products," Kenneth Warner of the University of Michigan explained to me. "On the other hand, the pessimist says we're on the verge of another light-cigarettes fiasco." The optimist sees a sunny time of lower risk and better health, Warner added, while the pessimist sees a dismal future. "But the thing is, nobody knows. It's the most complicated thing I've ever encountered in 30 years of working on tobacco policy. It is the single-most-difficult issue in terms of trying to predict where it will go or where it can go."

In New York that April afternoon, I asked Mowbray-d'Arbela what she would do if Filligent -- which has mainly been tested in laboratories -- were to have the unintended effect of making people ill. She dismissed that possibility, on the grounds that the chemical compound in the filter is already F.D.A. approved for medical uses. Still, she said, should there be any adverse reactions: "We'll stop it. Immediately." And if it has the adverse effect of keeping people from quitting? "I think we'd have to really think about that extremely carefully and look at what we've done wrong to try and address that," she replied. "Because that would. . . . "

She paused. She seemed to be sorting through, and then discarding, bad outcomes one by one, until finally she plowed forward, resolutely. After a few moments of what seemed like uneasy consideration, she had regained her bearings. "Something," she said, "would have had to have gone wrong for that to happen."

Jon Gertner, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about changes in the television ratings business.